Dev Diary #53

Happy new year everyone!
We hope you and your beloved ones are safe and stable coming into this hopefully way better year.
2020 was a mess in many regards but there seems to be a silver lining finally. Let's hope it will come true and we will get back some of the normality within the next months.

Regarding Sexy Exile however, we were lucky enough to not experience any major influence or holdup and could mostly go on with the development like normal. We made a buttload of progress, especially from the point where we got provided a full time coder and started to lay the groundwork for what will be the release version.
We have learned from the past that we should never make promises as game development with such a small team is full of surprises, but we have definitely entered the home stretch by now and I'll be damned (and I'll probably go mad) if we don't have people finally play our game this year.
We recently added some more reward content to the game in the form of girl's personal items to get to know them better and get some bonuses as well as more sexy outfits to collect. That also means now there's even more freelancers involved and after having some trouble with a few of them, we have assembled a very nice, talented and reliable team for all of the different parts of the game.
Recently, I personally spent most of my time getting the rest of the portrait and XXX animations ready with the help of our awesome new animator (almost done) and got most of the girl's dates and dialogues edited after all of them overhauled and brought to the same level of entertainment and juicyness by our writer/assistant, a dear friend who we could really not get this all done without.
Lastly, we now have a small team of freelance developers who take all of this and assemble it into our games database, cut all the reaction voice snippets we had several voice actresses record and a sound enigeer do the mastering for and add them to the dialogues along with facial expressions, outfit changes, location changes and cinematic effects where necessary. 

Rule #1 in game design: Everything is more work than you'd think :D
In the last year, with each step taken, more and more stuff that needs to be done or optimized became apparent and was added to a list. Now that we have almost all the initial tasks done, the game's main code nearing completion and all the contents steadily pouring into it, we can start to adress all these "little" things and take care of one of the most important overall tasks: the polishing.
You know how it is: A mediocre game with great polishing can leave a better impression than a great game with poor polishing.

That's why this step is so hard to estimate - we'd rather take a month or two more than planned than wasting years of work by releasing a poorly polished game. However, let's hope we don't actually need more time than anticipated ;)

In any way, you will hear from us.
And don't worry, as soon as there's something important like a beta, we will individually reach out to all past and current patrons that earned the according benefits so that you won't miss it :)

Take care, stay healty and stay tuned!
x
Zanzo